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In the case of 1. I'm certain a whole bunch of it is people getting high on their own supply; aka pay a marketer to hype your thing, your competitor does same,

In the case of 1. I'm certain a whole bunch of it is people getting high on their own supply; aka pay a marketer to hype your thing, your competitor does same, then you become afraid of all the progress your competitor has made (which is imaginary marketing hype). I've actually seen this dynamic at work in "AI" land; it's gotten me work. I've even seen it happen within the same company: marketing dude talks to engineer, gets it all wrong and exaggerates capabilities; then CEO demands to know why the capabilities in his sales literature don't exist in the product. I call it "human informational centipede." Hypesters and scammers always around; excepting in Theranos type cases, they mostly don't really push the needle. Pretty sure Irene Aldridge didn't change perceptions of HFT much, for example.

ghaff 7y ago
You definitely get into feedback loops. And if "everyone" is saying self-driving is right around the corner you also begin to doubt your own skepticism especially if you think others should be in a better position to know the reality than you are. To your first point, I agree there was something of a big game of topper going on for a while. If anyone came out and said that they weren't going to have production self-driving for 10 years (much less 20 or 30). A lot of people, including on boards like this, would nod their heads sadly about how far behind $COMPANY was compared to a certain other car company that was already supposedly selling self-driving-capable vehicles.